Recently, when Madonna deleted every post from her Instagram profile, it was as if a gay flare had been fired around the world.
Cue a flurry of texts from gay male friends, with one declaring that this “purging of the Sistine Chapel” meant the release of Confessions on a Dance Floor: Part II was imminent, 20 years after her original disco masterpiece, because Madonna had pulled the same stunt on Instagram in 2023 before announcing our gay Christmas: the Celebration tour.
“I CAN’T BREATHE,” texted a friend, in all caps.“She’s clearing the decks for the album,”
— wrote another.
“I’m screaming,” texted another friend as gay men across the internet lost their collective minds, posting endless videos about what it all meant.
Things went into gay overdrive when it was confirmed that Confessions II would be released on July 3 and Madonna sent our temperatures up even further by dropping the first single, I Feel So Free. Cue a new flurry of text messages.
Gay men, of course, have always claimed Madonna. She’s been their champion, particularly during the tragedy of the Aids epidemic when – along with Elizabeth Taylor – she was one of the few powerful voices to speak out publicly in support of the LGBTQ+ community. She also thrillingly showcased gay men’s lives – through her Blond Ambition tour dancers – in the culture-changing 1991 documentary Madonna: Truth or Dare AKA In Bed With Madonna, which at the time felt revolutionary.
While so much has been written about her over the past 40 years, missing from the conversation too often has been the central role she’s played in the lives of queer women, particularly of my generation.
Madonna made me realise I was a lesbian. And I can pinpoint the exact moment it happened: Madonna, clad in men’s boxer shorts, and sheer black, lace bra, dripping wet, hair slicked back, emerging from a pool in the 1985 cult classic, Desperately Seeking Susan.
In 1985, this was a lot for a 12-year-old gender-non-conforming kid from regional Australia to take in. As I sat in my town’s one cinema with my very girly school-friends, I felt what can only be described as lovesick. But, unlike my pals who could talk endlessly about their love of Rob Lowe or Michael J Fox, I couldn’t share this exciting new infatuation with anybody. Instead, I put a poster of her on my wall and stared at it endlessly.
In the years after Desperately Seeking Susan, my passion intensified into a full-blown one-sided love affair. I would rewind the Cherish video on VHS repeatedly where she frolicked with a merman just so I could watch her flex her arm muscles over and over again.
I would do the same with the Vogue video. For obvious reasons. (The bra-less see-through lace top – there’s a pattern forming.) The Express Yourself video where she had her hair slicked back and wore a men’s suit? Don’t get me started. The Justify My Love video where she kisses an androgynous woman in a Paris hotel deserves its own column.
As a teenager, when you’re supposed to be looking outward to romance and to the future, queer kids are forced to retreat, and to go deeply inward. It’s not an exaggeration to say Madonna was the great love of my life during that period. I didn’t have boyfriends, but I had her.
Her masculinity and strength drew lesbians to her from the start. Even as closeted teens or out women, we knew she was sending us a wink and a nudge in a way that we weren’t getting from other artists such as Kylie Minogue. I love Kylie, but any sapphic vibes sent our way – aside from the What Do I Have to Do? video – were minimal. Not only did Madonna love us, she also embraced us in a way that was unheard of. Madonna performed for us, she made us visible, and she made us hot. Just watch her performance of Bye Bye Baby at the 1993 MTV Music Video Awards where, dressed in white tie, top hat and tails exactly as Marlene Dietrich had 60 years before in the film Morocco, she frolicked with a bevy of beautiful women.
The early to mid-1990s when she left New York for Miami – or what I like to fondly recall as her “South Beach lesbian era” – were a particularly golden time for my people. There she was sitting courtside at Madison Square Garden watching the Knicks with Sandra Bernhard’s ex, and rumoured flame, Ingrid Casares. I would cut photos out of magazines of the two of them together and stick them on my wall. Or she’d be hanging out with the Calvin Klein model, and ex-girlfriend, Jenny Shimizu, who also appeared in the glorious Rain video. Another clip that got a substantial workout in my parents’ VHS player.
kd lang was often photographed with her, but it was the addition of Rosie O’Donnell into her inner circle that made the rest of us feel as if we were there, too. O’Donnell and Madonna met on the set of 1992’s A League of Their Own (another lesbian classic), giving my people one of the greatest pairings since Abba’s Frida and Agnetha. The true love story at the core of Penny Marshall’s beloved lesbian classic was between O’Donnell’s wisecracking (yet, pining!) Doris and Madonna’s flirtatious but aggressively straight, Mae – a classic lesbian dynamic.
Unsurprisingly, those years solidified my own sexuality. It helped that Madonna also released the controversial Sex book during that period. Forget the conservative hand-wringers, it was a work of art and a revelation to me: see the photo of her being embraced by a suit-clad Isabella Rossellini.
This was the time I fully embraced my true sexual identity, dancing with glorious abandon at queer dance parties in Melbourne, and later, Sydney, London and New York, all places I have lived in because – and I’m not ashamed to say it – Madonna inspired me to explore beyond the geography of where I was born. It’s also not an exaggeration to say that I could not have come out as young as I did in the early 90s if not for her.
Of course, there’s little doubt the entire queer community identifies with her in broad-stroke ways, but to erase the specificity of what she means – and has meant – to lesbians feels to me like another small erasure of lesbians themselves. It’s about time we reclaimed her.
